Jeffrey D. Sadow is an associate professor of political science at Louisiana State University Shreveport. If you're an elected official, political operative or anyone else upset at his views, don't go bothering LSUS or LSU System officials about that because these are his own views solely.
This publishes Sunday through Thursday with the exception of 7 holidays. Also check out his Louisiana Legislature Log especially during legislative sessions (in "Louisiana Politics Blog Roll" below).

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8.11.12

LA winners & losers, who ran & did not, in 2012 contests

As usual, election results produce
their share of winners and losers, and Louisiana politicians have no special
immunity to this. Thus, from the latest quadrennial elections, we find:

WINNER: Gov. Bobby
Jindal. While a Pres. Barack Obama
reelection will continue to create governance headaches for him and all
governors, on a career level that Rep. Paul Ryan (safely reelected to
his seat) did not win the vice presidency and Republicans will not be the party
of the White House leaves him with more
options and more upwards potential. Should Jindal fancy the presidency any
such quest would have been out the window for the next eight years, and even
then Ryan would have become the favorite to carry the party banner in eight
years. Now, they are more on terms with each other and Jindal has more control
over timing of attempted moves.

For a politician ambitious to the
highest level, a cabinet position does no real good and perhaps even harm, so a
Republican presidency offering him such a position conveyed no real benefit. Without
that kind of job, his only real option to keep the momentum going would have
been to run for the Senate in 2014. Even as those chances now are enhanced as a
result of the election, he could skip that step and go directly to running for
the presidency at the end of his term in 2015.

WINNER: Rep. Bill Cassidy. The
Baton Rouge-area Republican turned in the most impressive electoral performance
of the state’s incumbent winners while raising a lot and not spending much
money. He is well positioned to go for the Senate in 2014, aided by having
Obama continue, and now has a reduced chance of having to fight off Jindal for
the post.

WINNER: Scott Angelle. The
incoming District 2 Public Service Commissioner, given his past history as
serving in two state executive offices by appointment and working with Jindal
on the governor’s legislative agenda, he clearly has political talent. As a
result of winning this election handily without need of a runoff, he also
demonstrated considered fundraising acumen as well. All he needed was to
demonstrate he could put it all together for winning a prominent elected
office, and now he has in decisive fashion. He has a political future, which may
include his competing for Cassidy’s current gig should Cassidy go for the
Senate in two years.

LOSER: Sen. Mary Landrieu. While she
may be less likely to see Jindal as an opponent in 2014 after these elections,
her tenuous hold on office is more imperiled than ever thanks to the Obama
reelection. It’s bad enough that she would have to fight
off her controversial votes for Obama’s agenda, most particularly for the
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, but, worse, she will have to buck
the six-year presidential tide, as senators of a president’s party in his sixth
year historically are the most vulnerable.

Yet worst all, Obama seems
unlikely to have gotten the message that losing 5 million votes (relative to your opponent), 5 Senate
seats, 50 House seats, nine governorships and 10 state legislatures in four
years means that you have a long-term losing agenda if your opponents are
willing to exploit it by presenting a clear alternative. Obama, a true believer
of the discredited left, does not seek compromise but is gambling, in order to
increase Democrat and government control over people, that he can turn American
political culture from conceiving of the country as an opportunity society to
an entitlement society. He will double down on stupid, and unless the GOP
itself acts more stupidly and acquiesces, the internal contradictions of
liberalism will ensure that electoral shellacking is in the immediate future
for national Democrats.

That and the delayed costs of
legislation she approved such as the PPACA, which by the time of her campaign
will have clearly begun to show it neither protects patients’ interests nor is
affordable, by 2014 will tie an anchor around her neck that will pull her (and
many of her co-partisans) straight to the bottom of the electoral ocean. Cassidy
and Jindal, to name just two potential Republican opponents, are quality
conservative candidates with proven abilities to win. Always the beneficiary of
lucky timing in her three previous tries for office, on this occasion it all
will work against her.

LOSER: Rep. Jeff Landry. Had he, one of the
two incumbent Republicans thrown into the same district because of
redistricting, managed to get around 35 percent of the vote and stayed within
five percentage points of the other, Rep. Charles Boustany, he was at least an
even-money bet to win the Dec. 8 runoff. That contest will feature a noticeably
more conservative, less Democrat electorate that favors the more ideological
approach Landry takes.

Instead, he only cracked 30
percent and lagged Boustany by 15 points. By the slash-and-burn, take-no-prisoners
style of campaigning in which both engaged, this meant only the eventual winner
will have a chance to rehabilitate himself with voters and party-aligned interests
alienated by negative campaigning. Had
he conducted himself differently, perhaps not even challenging Boustany,
Landry may have curried favor with these interests who might have supported him
eagerly for something else relatively soon. Now a long shot to win, it might be
awhile before the scars heal enough for Landry to find enough support from enough
powerbrokers to try successfully for another prominent office.

LOSER: Rep. Cedric Richmond. That
the state’s only Democrat in the U.S. House pulled less than 56 percent of the
vote in a district 61 percent black and with an appreciable smattering of white
liberals indicates some serious vulnerability on his part. Clearly, and
especially with a presidential candidate identified as black on the ticket that
should encourage the opportunity for such voters to tick off his name on the
ballot, a non-trivial proportion of blacks in the district either are
disenchanted enough with him not to vote or to vote for white candidates running
against him. This opens the door for a more moderate black to scoop up those
disenchanted blacks, collect the non-conservative white vote, and peel off
other blacks from Richmond to send him to defeat in 2014, especially as the
black vote typically disproportionately diminishes relative to the white vote
in an off-year election.

3 comments:

Only a professional loon like Jeff could look at Obama winning the presidency so strongly (and in nearly all the swing states), and somehow come up with some excuse as to why he is some sort of loser. But Jeff is so full of sour grapes that he has to lash out somehow. Here, Jeff shows us that the right has learned nothing about Tuesday's loss. Instead, he retreats into the same hateful delusions typically found among the most hysterical conspiracy theorists. Obama, Jeff tells us, is the divisive one, and he wants "government control over people," whatever that means. Actually, it means a whole host of stupid initiatives that are 99% from the wild imagination of conspiracy theorists. In the real world, over the past four years we've had job growth, a recovering stock market, troops coming home, restoration of america's good image abroad (meaning fewer people who want to hurt us), expansion of live-saving health care into groups who previously lacked it, ending of the disgraceful practice of institutionalize torture by an American government, and plenty of other accomplishments. All these accomplishments make morons like Jeff livid because he can't claim them for his team. That's why morons like Jeff resort to hysterics, vitriol, and barricade themselves in Foxnews' manufactured outrage factory. To see just how prescient people like Jeff are about what liberal rule will bring, here is a letter that Focus on the Family penned in 2008 before the first Obama triumph. They wrote a fictional letter from the future (2012) cataloging thirty-two apocalyptic changes that Obama wrought from 2008-12. Of course, all thirty-two never came to pass, and are all hilarious in the depths of delusion. But people like Jeff will just dust off the letter and push forward with even more delusions, having learned nothing. It is breathtaking to watch such profound stupidity coming from Rs in the aftermath of the election.

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